But, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, not everyone is happy about the Pentagon moving more into the realm of state building. Kate Almquist, on the Center for Global Development’s Rethinking U.S. Foreign Assistance Blog, has written a provocative piece that’s worth a read on combining and confusing development and military efforts:

In her recent Foreign Policy column, “The Pivot to Africa,” Rosa Brooks made a plea for letting go of comfortable old assumptions about roles and missions between the civilian and non-civilian sides of the U.S. government, particularly when it comes to civil-military cooperation in Africa. My plea is for an evidence-based discussion of U.S. development policy and its intersection with U.S. national security.

U.S. interests will be ill-served if we merely move from comfortable old (and false) assumptions about poverty and terrorism in Africa to comfortable new (and equally false) assumptions about “whole-of-government responses” to complex challenges. While the United States should of course think and work creatively, skepticism and, dare I say, opposition, from civilian agencies to AFRICOM taking on non-traditional military roles is not rooted in turf battles but in legitimate concerns about efficiency and results.

In terms of comfortable old assumptions about poverty and terrorism, the reality is far more complex than “poverty breeds terrorism.” We know from empirical research that underlying “root causes” – socioeconomic, political, and cultural drivers of violent extremism – are important.

In the short term the United States has been very poor at developing countries. However, if you look at some long term successes such as Germany and Japan post World War Two we can see that the United States presence in these countries for more than fifty years is very beneficial. When is a better time to start building long term relations in Africa than now?